1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the area of electronic commerce via various mediums, and particularly related to method and system for providing auctions to win with a lowest bid, where the bid must be unique.
2. Description of the Related Art
An auction is the process of buying and selling goods by offering them up for bidding, taking bids, and then selling an auctioned item to the winning bidder. Auctioning can be traced as far back as 500 B.C. In economic theory, an auction is a method for determining the value of a commodity that has an undetermined or variable price. Auctions can be done with reserve or minimum, or without minimums, or absolute or no reserve. In reserve auctions, there is a minimum bid or reserve price; if the bidding does not reach the minimum, there is no sale (but the person who puts the item up for auction may still owe a fee to the auctioneer or auction company). In absolute or no reserve auctions, the sale is guaranteed, with only the price left to be determined. In the context of auctions, a bid is an offered price.
There are many types of auctions, such as English auction, Chinese auction, Dutch auction, Sealed-bid first-price auction, Sealed-bid second-price auction, and All-pay auction. All of the auctions are revenue equivalent, meaning that they all result in the same expected revenue for a seller. The purchaser in the end is always a bidder who pays the highest price for an item among all bidders.
eBay (www.ebay.com) is a pioneer in online actions and provides probably the largest electronic auction platform that allows anyone who can access to the Internet to participate in bidding anything from a component to a vacation. The rules are simple. Before a deadline, whoever bids the highest price wins the item being auctioned. The auctioneer, eBay, gets a fractional fee out of the fee paid by the highest bidder, and the seller gets the rest.
One of the issues of selling items on eBay is that an item has to be sold if there is only one bidder regardless of the price offered by the bidder. With millions of items being auctioned on eBay, there is a likelihood that some items are deserted and draw far less bidding than they should have. As a result, the sellers may not maximize what they have hoped from auctioning their items.
The present invention discloses a different type of auction that announces a winning bid that is lowest but unique at the end of the auction.